gender studies

Last year, I read about a case of a nurse who alleged being sexually harassed by a doctor during her job interview, and a couple of months later I was struck by a report from the Netherlands about the high rate of sexual harassment experienced by female nursing and healthcare workers. Although cases like these make it seem like doctors and managers are the primary perpetrators of sexual harassment, reports show that it is patients who sexually harass nurses most often.

With a recent study suggesting that nurses simply distance themselves from patients who are sexually inappropriate, how do nurses maintain quality health care of these patients? A new book, Catheters, Slurs, and Pick-up Lines: Professional Intimacy in Hospital Nursing (Temple University Press) sheds light on female nurses’ experiences of being sexually harassed by patients.  For this month’s column, I had the chance to ask the author, sociologist Lisa Ruchti, Ph.D. of West Chester University, about nurses experiences of “intimate conflicts” with patients.

Adina Nack: Why did you decide to study the dynamics of patient-nurse interactions?

Lisa Ruchti: I initially thought that nurses’ experiences of sexual harassment by patients would be similar to waitresses’ experiences of sexual harassment by customers because they are each one type of women’s work. Instead, I found that nurses did not refer to their encounters as ‘sexual harassment’ because work culture affects definitions of sexual harassment (other sociologists have found this too; for example, Christine Williams and Kirstin Dellinger).  In nursing, it was the fact that nurses provided both professional and intimate care that contributed to differences in how and when nurses said they were sexually harassed. I became intrigued with the function of intimacy in professional care work and wanted to learn more.

AN: I’m intrigued by the concept of “professional intimacy” – how is this experienced by nurses?

LR: In my work, I found that nurses negotiated a cycle of what I call “professional intimacy” with patients. I also found that negotiating intimate conflict with patients is inextricably a part of how nurses gain their trust. Nurses start with gaining the intimate trust of their patients. This trust sometimes escalates to patients having feelings of familiarity for their nurses, which leads to conflict for the nurse. These conflicts include patients feeling entitled to service beyond the scope of care in nursing, angry verbal interactions, and/or sexualized entitlement. This conflict can also be unavoidable such as the ways that nurses negotiated the sexual encounters between patients and their visitors. Nurses negotiate care through this conflict to renew trust to ensure that quality health care is administered.

AN: How do nurses experience conflict when providing care to patients?

LR: The majority of the 45 nurses I interviewed avoided describing patient care as involving conflict. They used words like nurture, kindness, and compassion to make it seem like nurses “being caring” was a natural personality characteristic characterized by goodness. Feminist philosopher Eva Kittay discusses this in her work: patients are not usually described as anything other than “needy,” and we don’t tend to think of needy people as causing conflicts for those who provide their care. My focus on identifying conflict is as much about seeing patients clearly as it is about seeing the work of nurses clearly.

AN: You make a key point about not only a nurse’s sex but also her race/ethnicity shaping her experiences of patients’ harassment – can you give a couple of examples of how nurses described these interactions?

LR: It is one thing for nurses to manage sexually explicit language or touches; it is quite another when those are combined with racial slurs and epithets.  Imagine that a nurse not only walks in to check on a patient and sees himmasturbating, but she is also called a “dirty foreigner.” Or, a nurses isgiving a patient a bath, and the patient says you remind him of his mammy. It was incredibly important for me to look at the function of multiple identities since I was looking at intimate care as something that is constructed in interaction between patients and nurses and informed by social ideologies. Intersectionality is an incredibly useful tool when explaining complex social experiences.

AN: As a medical sociologist, I was instantly hooked by your book’s title, but I can also see why many of us — not just nurses — should read your book. 

LR: Thanks, I wrote it not just to give voice to nurses but also because almost all of us have all been patients or visited loved ones in hospitals. Many of us have or will have long medical journeys at some point in our lives, and this book can help us understand a vital part of that journey. If we can better understand the lives of those who are taking care of us, then we can help ensure that quality care occurs when we need it.  Other studies have documented how much nurses care about patients, and it’s time for us to listen to their stories – we need to understand their experiences of caring for us.

2011 brought us two top-selling autobiographical takes on female aging. Jane Fonda’s Prime Time asks readers to explore everything from friendship to fitness to sex, with a goal of having us accept that “people in their 70s can be sexually attractive and sexually active.”  Betty White’s If you Ask Me (And Of Course You Won’t) offers readers a candid and often humorous take on the last 15 years of her life. White warns of the pitfall of our youth-centric culture: “So many of us start dreading age when we’re in high school. And I think that’s really a waste of a lovely life.”  While these celebrity authors paint provocative personal portraits of aging, I’m drawn to the new book by Colgate sociologist Meika Loe, Ph.D.: Aging Our Way: Lessons for Living from 85 and Beyond (Oxford University Press) charts her three-year journey following the lives of 30 diverse “elders” (women and men ages 85 to 102 years old), most of whom were aging at home and making it work.

Adina Nack: How did your last book on the Viagra phenomenon lead you to your new book on the ‘oldest old’?

Meika Loe: For The Rise of Viagra I interviewed elder men and elder women partners of Viagra users. It became clear that ageism impacted their lives and was a key ideology that propelled the Viagra phenomenon forward. Afterwards, I missed those interactions with elders and wanted to know more about their experiences aging at home. Aging Our Way ended up being a book that focuses more on elder women’s experiences, voices that had been marginalized, if not completely absent, from the media coverage of the Viagra phenomenon.  In the 85+ age group, women outnumber men by almost 3 to 1, and close to 80% of elders living at home alone are women. Too many people assume that research on elders is sad and depressing, in comparison to research on Viagra. To the contrary! I find elders’ stories inspirational. Aging Our Way features the lessons I learned from them – lessons for all ages.

AN: Aside from the Viagra interviews, what inspired you to focus on this group of people who are all more than twice your age?

ML: I was extremely close with my grandparents and great-grandparents growing up. More recently, I rent a room from a village elder in the small town where I work. Living with her, an invisible world opened up to me – a world of widows caring for one another and collectively attending to quality of life, mostly in the absence of biological kin.  Like, Carol, my seventy-something landlady, who gets a check-in call from octogenarian Joanne every morning at 8 a.m. Then Carol calls 98-year-old Ruth. All of these widows have lived alone in their homes within 10 square blocks of each other for decades, and now they constitute a social family. Once in a great while, when Carol cannot reach Ruth, she’ll grab the extra key and head to her home to make sure everything is okay. One time she found Ruth on the floor.

AN: That must have been scary – so, even with this type of ‘morning phone tree’, isn’t isolation a problem for these women and men aging alone?

ML: Yes, like most of us, elders attempt that delicate balancing act between dependence and independence every day. So, while many of these elders value independent-living, they’re also adept at building social networks. Ruth H. is committed to making a new friend every year of her life: she reaches out to my campus’s Adopt-a-Grandparent group and has five student walking partners this year, all new friends. That said, aging alone comes with its share of isolation and risk, and I’m reminded of Elizabeth, a Navy veteran and high school English teacher who insisted on living alone in her home, amidst her longtime friends and neighbors, despite her children’s pleas for her to move to Georgia. Elizabeth recently passed away during Hurricane Irene. She was inspecting her basement for flooding and must have fallen. This is such a sad story, but Elizabeth would not have wanted it any other way: she said she wanted to die with her boots on.

AN: Do women have an advantage over men when it comes to longevity and aging?

ML: Social epidemiologists Lorber and Moore have shown that women live longer but not necessarily healthier lives. Traditional gender roles take their toll: often, women prioritize caring for others for so long that their own health suffers.  Perhaps as a result, women have higher rates of chronic illness and depression. At the same time, many of the women I followed are enjoying a chapter in their lives where they can focus on themselves, their communities, their gardens, and their own health. Shana, 95, says things like “Now I am finally living for myself. Now I can focus on me.” Most women have lifelong gendered skill-sets for self-care: systems for food preparation, cleaning, bathing, budgeting, and reaching out to others. The men I followed are less adept at those skills: they had never been expected to cook and clean. So men, like Glenn, told me about having to learn these skills after the loss of their spouses.

AN: Does caretaking of others really end at age 85?

ML: Caretaking continues, often in new and familiar ways.  I think of Olga, age 97, caring for her grandson every weekend and putting aside a few dollars every day for her daughter who is battling cancer.  In her subsidized senior housing community, she delivers hot meals, hems pants, and runs errands. By caretaking, Olga feels a sense of community, a web of support. When she needs assistance, she has options and knows where to turn. So contrary to expecting nonagenarians to be sickly and dependent, many not only receive but also give care.

AN: Talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare has been in the news – how did you see these programs impacting elders’ lives?

ML: I have to admit – in my 30s, I see money going out of my paycheck—and I remind myself that that money is put aside for when I need it – I just hope it will be there! Through this research I saw how and why programs like Medicare and Social Security matter. For example, Juana worked in factories her whole adult life, and her small Social Security check keeps her hovering above the poverty line, able to afford rice and beans for the family and to pay for cable TV so she can watch her beloved Yankees.  Medicare covers annual doctor’s visits that likely keep her from spending time in the emergency room, a more expensive cost for society. Like most elders, she depends on Social Security for a significant portion of her income.

AN: Why should we all – not just the elders in the U.S. – read your book?

ML: Undergrads come to my Sociology of Aging course with all sorts of preconceived notions. They dread aging, seeing it as synonymous with depression, disease, and death. Our ageist society has taught them that aging equals loss, and they’re surprised to learn about elders who are aging on their own terms: coordinating self-care, combating isolation and loneliness, and exercising autonomy and control – sometimes in the face of disabilities and chronic illnesses. We all benefit from learning creativity, connectivity and resiliency from our elders. They teach us crucial lessons about all stages in life: living in moderation, designing comfortable spaces, constructing social families, appreciating humor and touch, and building social capital.  And, let’s face it, if we’re lucky, then we will all be elders soon enough.

Ask me five years ago and I’d have told you I’d be first in line to challenge gender stereotypes if ever I had kids myself.  I minored in feminist cultural studies!  I believe boys and girls are made, not just born!  But sixteen months into parenting my boy/girl twins, I’m starting to wonder how I’ll ever ensure that my boy grows up sensitive and my girl stays, as one of my favorite organizations has trained me to say, strong, brave, and bold.

It’s an unfortunate moment for complacency.  Children are boxed into hyper-gendered categories at ages younger than ever before.  Just last month, Disney infiltrated the delivery room.  New research shows that girls as young as three are internalizing the thin ideal.  As blogger Pigtail Pals reports, a study by Dr. Jennifer Harriger, published in 2010 finds that preschoolers are attributing stereotypes to others because of their weight.  The news is distressing.  Gender-aware parents can cleanse our daughters’ bedrooms of pale pink and defend a love for Tinkerbelle in our sons, yet the clutch of our pink-vs.-blue culture seems only to tighten its hold.  Why, we’re all asking, is this so?

There’s ample proof that since the utopian hope of “Free to Be You and Me” in the 1970s, as a culture we’ve slid backwards. As Peggy Orenstein documents so thoroughly and well in Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie Girl Culture (reviewed here this week by Elline!), things are far worse than they were when we grew up.  The hyper-marketing of gendered purchases target kids at an increasingly vulnerable age, and it’s enough to make any parent tired.

We can blame Disney and we can fight the princesses, but perhaps two additional reasons that a generation of parents raised on feminism feels like we’re losing the war is that 1) we’re confused and 2) we’re alone.

We’re confused by “science.” Fighting gender-based discrimination has morphed into dealing with science, which carries boldfaced authority—and many feminist scientists themselves are now fighting this fight too.  Sometimes I wonder about the effects.  Have Gen X parents grown convinced of children’s innate gender sensibilities?  Decades of media stories hawking the latest in neuroscience have emphasized the nature side of the nurture debate that second-wave feminism famously upstaged.  Have the things we’ve heard about gender affected a new generation’s parenting behavior?  “The more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies, and start attributing every skill or deficit to innate sex differences,” suggests neuroscientist Lise Eliot in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, (which argues, by the way, that social expectations—not biological differences—have the upper hand in shaping who our children become.)  Sensational, whiplash-inducing headlines tell us gender is inborn—no, wait, made—no, born.  Unless you’re steeped in this research, it’s often hard to know what’s what anymore.

But our biggest problem, I fear, is that when it comes to resisting the hyper-genderfication of childhood, we’re largely fighting it alone.

Over the past sixteen months, as my babies have progressed from a crawl to a walk and now to words, it’s slowly dawned on me how much the premise of my previous book, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, applies to my new situation: As parents, and especially as new parents, we don’t always feel plugged into a movement to change the larger culture in which we raise our kids.  Instead, we’re left to focus on ourselves—in this case, our familial microcosms—on our own.

To be sure, there’s a burgeoning movement out there. I’m a huge fan of initiatives like SPARK and the Geena Davis Institute and efforts to redefine girly like Pigtail Pals and of course the longstanding work of Girls Inc.  I voraciously consume every new book by educators like Lyn Mikel Brown to learn what we can do to resist (See Packaging Girlhood, Packaging Boyhood, and also the resource page at the wonderful Peggy Orenstein’s site.) But these initiatives aren’t as mainstreamed as they might be.  I can control my growing babies’ media consumption and control what comes in the house, but control only goes so far.  I fear that as a new mother, I’m long on feminist parenting ideals, short on ways to make them stick in the world outside my home.

I hear that change feels more possible once your kids hit kindergarten.  My friends there tell me that they feel successful in their attempts to provide a larger context in which it’s natural for their girl to love Star Wars and their boy to take ballet.  They feel effective.  They feel their actions span far.

In the meantime, we mothers of babes continue our preparations for the good fight by lining our children’s bookshelves with The Sissy Duckling and No I Will NOT Wear a Dress and painting our nurseries sage.  But short of a massive and visible movement—you know, like the political ones we see right now on tv—sometimes I worry.  Are we all just focusing on the equivalent of wardrobes and walls?

What do YOU think?  Do you see a new generation of parents taking on the battle against the hyper-genderfication of childhood in spades?  Is there a movement?  Or are we all basically out here on our own?  If you have strong thoughts on this either way, for a writing/blogging/thinking project I’m working on (The Pink and Blue Diaries), I’d love to hear from you.  Please email me at deborah@shewrites.com

I have said it before about sexually transmitted diseases and HPV vaccines, and now I will say it again about brain trauma and football — men’s health is a feminist issue. 

Back in 2007, a NYT article covered “Wives United by Husbands’ Post-N.F.L. Trauma” whose activism motivated the NFL creating the “88 Plan” to provide dementia benefits.  Then, in 2008, a LA Times op-ed proclaimed, “The NFL’s in denial about depression.”  This week, the NYT article “A Suicide, a Last Request, a Family’s Questions” added yet another tragedy to the growing number of media stories about the physically and psychologically devastating consequences for NFL players. 

As I read it, I found myself flashing back to when I was an undergrad and first read sociologist Michael Messner‘s academic article, “When bodies are weapons: Masculinity and violence in Sport.” What does it mean for boys and men — and for all of us — when   not only normalize but also reward boys and men for using their bodies as weapons?

Check out the abstract (bold font added for emphasis):

This paper utilizes a feminist theoretical framework to explore the contemporary social meanings of sports violence. Two levels of meaning are explored: first, the broad, socio-cultural and ideological meanings of sports violence as mediated spectacle; second, the meanings which male athletes themselves construct. On the social/ideological level, the analysis draws on an emergent critical/feminist literature which theoretically and historically situates sports violence as a practice which helps to construct hegemonic masculinity. And drawing on my own in-depth interviews with male former athletes, a feminist theory of gender identity is utilized to examine the meanings which athletes themselves construct around their own participation in violent sports. Finally, the links between these two levels of analysis are tentatively explored: how does the athlete’s construction of meaning surrounding his participation in violent sports connect with the larger social construction of masculinities and men’s power relations with women?

Mainstream U.S. society continues to validate a very narrow construction of socially acceptable masculinity.  When I teach the Sexuality and Society course at CLU, I ask my undergrad students to tell me the traits of an “ideal” man.  Each time, a new group of students generate basically the same list which includes being heterosexual, tall, muscular/physically strong, and a “protector.”  With this clear and consistent construction of masculine bodies, it’s not a surprise that the NFL continues to attract players who are willing to sacrifice their health and fans who enjoy the spectacle. 

The lure of the N.F.L. — the glory of hyper-masculinity — masks the still unmeasurable damage that these players (and their families) endure.  Their sacrifices allow ‘armchair athletes’ to vicariously revel in battles on the gridiron.  These warriors, ill-protected by sports gear masquerading as armor, are paying steep prices for embodying unrealistic and unhealthy ideals of what it means to be a man in the U.S.  

As research studies work to document the ways in which this sport consistently results in life-changing injuries (and sometimes life-ending conditions), we owe it to boys and men to challenge the status quo.  But, how can we hope to do this if, as one political science blogger suggested, “Americans have begun to construe access to football spectating as a social right“?

I often write here about the girl in my life, my daughter, Maya.

Today I want to focus on girls nationally. The National Women’s Studies Association convened several girl-serving organizations at its 2010 conference, and learned, among other things, that the organizations wanted to broaden the audience for disseminating research and information about their programs.

To that end, NWSA created a research roundup. Some highlights:

• 90% of Girls For A Change participants know they can create change in their communities, they can and will use those skills to create change in their own lives
• The Girl Scout Leadership Experience curriculum is designed so that girls learn to advocate for themselves and others, locally and globally
• Hardy Girls Healthy Women offers a strength-based approach to working with girls and is grounded in a review and critique of resilience literature for its over-emphasis on the individual and lack of attention to relationships and environments
• Smart-Girl is a program that works with 8^th grade girls in Denver, Colorado; a program evaluation shows that participants had increases in science grades and overall GPA

Even this brief overview points to some effective strategies for serving girls: we can teach girls to take leadership and translate their ideas into action.  We can create sustaining, respectful spaces for girls to engage and learn.  GWP readers, what has worked for you?  What other girl-serving organizations do you know?

You’ll also find highlights from girl-centered presentations at last year’s NWSA conference, with topics ranging from public education to food and sexualization.

This promises to be a growing area in NWSA.  The conference proposal submission deadline has been extended until February 21, 2011. Plan to come and find out the latest in the world of girls and girls’ studies!

This past week you might have noticed something different around here.

In addition to a guest post from Andrea Doucet (author of Do Men Mother? and a forthcoming book tentatively titled The Bread and Roses Project: Breadwinning Moms and the New ‘Problem with No Name’) about whether dads are facing discrimination on the playgrounds and a well-earned celebratory announcement from Veronica Arreola (go SCIENCE GRRL!), a number of regular GWP writers devoted our monthly columns to various aspects of historian Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.  Coontz’s book is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book.  A forum about book about a book?  Sounds rather…discursive.  So why did we do it?

As “crossover” scholar type peeps, we think the way conversations about feminism play out in public, in this case the cultural conversation about a second-wave feminist text, are important to track.  As a generation, we’re indebted to Betty Friedan for her classic.  And we’re  indebted to Stephanie Coontz for reviving a conversation about the journey this book helped launch–not only for women at the dawn of the 1960s, but for those of us striving for egalitarian marriages and humane workplaces and raising our children here in 2011.

Here’s a recap:

To kick it off, Virgina Rutter (NICE WORK) asked two dear friends, one born in 1935, the other born in 1940, to tell her their experiences around the publication of Friedan’s TFM in 1963. The kicker: they’re both men.

Fueled by Coontz’s analysis, we cleared up some myths about TFM and encouraged readers to Test Your Feminine Mystique Cliche Quotient. In a Review of ‘Stirring’ Reviews, we offered a reading of the initial reviews of Coontz’s book appearing in in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, Salon, Ms., Bitch, and feministing.

Natalie Wilson (POP GOES FEMINISM) asked whether “Housewives” today are just as “Desperate” as in the era documented by Friedan and offers up pop-culture infused Thoughts on Coontz’s A Strange Stirring.

Finally, Deborah Siegel (MAMA W/PEN) waxed intergenerational and mused on How the Choices of Our Generation Are Shaped By the Last. (Your comments on that one are giving me–it’s Deborah here–tons of food for thought…!)

We hope you find the discussion of interest.  We’d love your feedback.  And if you’d like to see more of this kind of group forum, or would like to propose one yourself for the future, please do let us know!